Endless Forms Most Beautiful
by MysteryTrek
Summary: Dipper and Pacifica are fresh out of high school. Ready to explore the world together...and perhaps explore feelings for each other that have been building for quite some time. A discovery by Ford and McGucket however, hurtles them on an adventure that will take them back to the very dawn of human existence...and test their love and themselves, to the very limits of their humanity.
1. Epigraph

"If seeds in the black earth can turn into such beautiful roses, what might not the heart of man become in its long journey toward the stars?"

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, British writer, poet, and theologian (1874-1936)

"Though leaves are many, the root is one."

-William Butler Yeats, Irish poet (1865-1939) "Coming of Wisdom with Time"

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

-Thomas Stearns Elliot OM, British poet and essayist (1888-1965) _Four Quartets_ "Little Gidding"


	2. Chapter One

A/N: This is a little something I've been working on the past few months. I figured I'd get it up now before life got too busy. I'll update it when I can, but I'm particularly proud of it. I double majored in anthropology and history and I wanted to write something that took full advantage of my knowledge.

Chapter One

Pacifica Elise Northwest gave an irritated, frustrated groan as she sat in the passenger seat of her best friend's Ford F-150, her stomach in knots as they drove through the medium sized Oregon town where she'd been born and raised for the first thirteen years of her life. She found herself wiping her hands on her stomach impulsively. This was the first time she'd been back in this mansion in five years. After her parents had snuck out in disgrace for their…impulsive decision to support Bill Cipher…and carried them with her.

"Will you relax, Paz?" Dipper said, touching her shoulder lightly. She flinched, and felt her face burn. It had been doing that more and more often of late. _Perhaps it's how tall he's become-stop that._ "You laid your life on the line to save this town. And this planet. You fought for these people as much as any of us. A lynch mob's not going to chase you down the center of town just because of who your parents were."

"That's easy for you to say," she groused. " _Your_ dad didn't walk up to Bill Cipher in full view of everyone in town and, I shit you not, say 'I would just like to say that as a rich capitalist I welcome your tyrannical rule. Perhaps I could be one of your, uh... horsemen of the apocalypse?'" _And paid the price for it,_ shuddering at the memory of what Bill Cipher had done to her father's face. Him screaming out of orifices that were no longer in their right places in relation to each other as he fell twitching to the ground…

"I know," Dipper said with the air of someone who'd heard this story before. Multiple times. "But you rejected them. At least until after they were defeated."

"But we lost everything," She stared at the mansion on the hill, stage of her childhood and all it's horrible memories. "Except that vacation home of ours in Piedmont." _Where they died, not long after we arrived. And I would have almost certainly have died myself before the end of that year, it wasn't for you and your family._ "And now we're going back to the house I have nothing but bad memories in." And they were going to stay there the entire summer. With the old Shack now Soos' in fact, as well as in name. And with he and Melody's first child on the way, they simply had no room at the Shack for the three of them, as they had the first few summers since Weirdmageddon. Granted, it made a certain amount of sense. The McGuckets were on great terms with the Pines, and since Fiddleford's son and his family still lived elsewhere in town, they had plenty of space.

But that wasn't just it. They'd discovered something in her family's old archives. The ones they didn't have the time or resources to move when they'd pulled out.

"I have no idea what they've discovered, Paz," Dipper said soothingly. "All I know is that Grunkle Ford and McGuckett have discovered something. And the implications of it must be profound, because they're refusing to tell us what it is unless it's in person. They're talking us while exercising operational security for the first time in five years."

"Priceless works of art?" Mabel speculated from the backseat as she knitted her sweater. The sweater she was wearing was typical Mabel Pines work. A lakefoam green sweater with a stylized representation of the entire continent of Africa worked in gold on the front. A representation of humanity's mother continent that shone beautifully in the light of the sun setting through the windows. "Nazi gold?"

She fervently hoped it wasn't the latter. Not that it'd really surprise her at this point, but she'd rather not have to deal with bars of gold smelted down from the gold fillings of Holocaust victims.

"Well," he said, as their truck began to climb, going up the dirt road to the top of the hill towards the vast wooden gates of what she supposed was now McGuckett Manor (and really, he and his family deserved it far more than his parents did, if only for what they'd done to her for her entire life). "I suppose we're about to find out."

* * *

"Dipper!" A boisterous voice said and he smiled as he saw the kindly face of one of his twin great uncles. Kindly, but the brown eyes in that square jawed angular face were alight with a passionate intensity he hadn't seen in quite a few years. His thick arms, still muscular despite being almost seventy were stretched wide on his broad shoulders. And Dipper, thick of limb and broad of shoulder himself, stepped into his embrace.

"Ford!" He said brightly. "God it's been too long."

"Yes, it has Dipper," and the happiness shone through on his voice. "I'm glad to see you." He looked behind him at his sister and Pacifica, "good to see you all."

 _It took a bit of convincing for one of us,_ and he turned back to see his sister and Paz standing in the doorway. And as always, though with more increasing frequency in the past couple years, he found herself arrested by her beauty. The tall, athletic woman's long, blonde hair fell down to her shoulders in combed tresses. Her eyes were as blue as the summer sky. And her legs, oh yes her legs. He shook himself and broke the hug hastily before his arousal made itself known. _Get it together, Pines, she doesn't see you like that._ He had noticed her, really _noticed_ her, as a girl, five years earlier. At the Northwest Fest in 2012, when he'd seen her in that green evening dress that flattered the hint of the figure that had ripened in the last few years. Even through the chaos of that night, he hadn't been able to help but admit that she looked good. And the scent she'd had when she'd hugged him that first time, that scent of champagne and flowers that had forced its way up his nostrils and briefly short-circuited his brain. It had stayed with him through the years and other relationships since…and so had she. And as much as he hoped to deny how he felt about her, he knew he was in love with her. In love with that beautiful elegant girl. A girl who had managed to survive the worst the world could throw at her, a girl with steel rebar running through her veins. _But I'm pretty sure she doesn't see me like that._

 _You haven't asked though._

"So," he said a touch too quickly. "What's this about?"

"Right," Ford said. "Follow us. What we found is this way."

Dipper lead the group in following Ford to the elevator at the back of the hall. The hall's decorations had changed since the…change in management. Gone were most of the taxidermized animal heads that had decorated the hallway. Replacing them were images of people and objects associated with the great advances in science and engineering. On the lefthand wall, Full pictures of Orville and Wilbur Wright flanked a picture of their flying machine. There were pictures of everyone associated with the harnessing of electricity and the development of radio. From Hans Christian Oersted, through Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell and (to his surprise, considering Ford's predilections) both Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla.

On the right wall were innovators in the field of biology and genetics. Including the discoverers of DNA, Francis Crick, James Watson, and Rosalind Franklin.

"I'll admit," Paz said approvingly from his right. "I love what they've done with the place. Not that the hunting trophies and mementos didn't have their place, I enjoy hunting myself, but looking back it was obvious they were…trying too hard."

Dipper nodded. He could hear the pain on her voice, the memories, good and bad that no amount of uplifting scientific monuments could erase. Dipper larger hand took hers, and he smiled reassuringly. A smile that said in no uncertain terms, that no matter what he was going to be there for her no matter what.

 _I love you,_ he thought and stiffened in shock, swallowing the lump in his throat. His thoughts had gravitated more and more towards that in the last couple years, but this was the first time he attached the terminology he knew to his soul was correct to what he was feeling, even in the privacy of his own thoughts. He loved her. He loved _her._

And come what may, he had to tell her.

"Here's the discovery," Ford's voice broke in, and Dipper jolted. He and Pacifica's hands flew apart And he looked around him, trying to reorient himself to his surroundings. He was in a brightly lit lab. There was a bank of desktop computers on the right wall and a mass spectrometer among other equipment he couldn't identify off the top of his head against the other wall. Then his breath caught in his throat, and he had to grab onto Paz and Mabel's shoulders to keep himself from going to the floor when his knees buckled in sheer shock. Sitting in the center of the room, connected to computers and monitoring equipment, was an enormous device, over three meters wide at the base. It was in rough shape of a propane tank, but festooned with ports and screens. Including one, that to his human eyes looked like a stick figure of a person with his hands raised towards the sky, God alone only knew what it meant to the entities who'd actually constructed. He'd recognized it from the journals the moment he'd seen it.

"This is the hyperdrive from Crash Site Omega," Dipper said softly. "Isn't it?"

"No, Dipper," a familiar scratchy voice said from his right and he turned to see a door open to see Fiddleford McGucket entering the room from what was clearly one of the storage closets. He had shed the hillbilly outfit for the most part, and was in an appropriate white lab coat. But his beard and hair were as snow white as ever, whiter even than the coat he wore. "According to Ford it had burned itself out when Stan used the portal to rescue him."

"Then were-" he heard a nonplussed Pacifica begin.

"Now you understand why I called you up here earlier than when you usually come for your summer," Ford began.

"You mean," Paz said softly, unable to tear her eyes away from the device in the center of the room. "That you found this in one of my family's archive rooms."

"Yes," Ford said, "we were hoping if you could shed any details on how or when your family might have acquired it. I mean there were other crash I've found in my travels. One for every letter in the Greek alphabet, but the closest one was the Omega site."

The shock was enough to have Paz wrenching her gaze away from the hyperdrive and back towards him, his shock mirrored in her eyes. There were twenty-four letters in the Greek alphabet. Twenty-four wrecked alien ships all over the world.

"My God," he said softly.

"Yes, that's what I said as I logged the location of Crash Site Omicron in Tanzania," Ford remarked dryly.

"As to your question," Paz continued on, turning back to Ford, "I wish I could help you, but I can't. We," she said, referring to her parents and her, never used more than the very upper levels for storage purposes. "And if my dad or his father knew this was down there, he never told me." She shook her head in amazement.

"How the hell did you find it, anyway?" Mabel asked from behind them.

"I was planning on expanding the basement lab complex," McGucket's scratchy voice broke in. "Into the basement one floor below this one. Funnily enough I was planning on trying to replicate the hyperdrive technology from what was left over from five years ago. I don't need to tell you how revolutionary that would be for space travel."

"Anything that can free us from the bonds of general relativity is alright by me," Dipper responded feelingly. Einstein's theory of general relativity basically stated that mass as the flipside of energy, needed more energy to propel itself the closer it got to the speed of light, represented in the famous equation as _c._ The closer, say, a ship got to _c,_ the more force was required to propel it. The ratio of energy to mass increased to the point that a ship attempting to reach the speed of light in vacuum, one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second, required an infinite amount of energy to reach. Since nothing was capable of generating truly infinite amounts of energy, reaching or exceeding the speed of light was impossible. General relativity didn't, however, prohibit _apparent_ FTL. The notion that distorted spacetime would allow objects or information to reach destinations at faster than it would take light to travel the normal way. It was the premise underlying _Star Trek_ 's famous warp drive (and it's real world theoretical counterpart, the Alcubierre drive), and the notion of the traversable wormhole (also something explored on _Star Trek_.)

And it was the latter was the premise underlying the device he now stared at, hooked up to the very human monitoring systems that surrounded it in a concentric arc. It literally channeled Einstein-Rosen bridges through space. And hence, also in accordance with general relativity, time.

"What are you currently doing with it now?"

"We're planning on powering it up," McGucket responded matter-of-factly. "We don't have nearly enough power on hand to generate any kind of spatial distortion. But we need to see if we can't find a way to access its software. See if we can't either build some kind of bridge, or more likely, develop our own versions of the software. I don't actually think we'll end up doing any kind of extensive field testing with this device; it'll probably be taken apart in order to figure out how to build more of them."

Dipper nodded. "Makes sense. Ultimately the only true test of a hyperdrive is to install it on a spacecraft. And head out." He sighed, blinking back tears. The fact that this, this _gem_ , had been under their very noses for God only knew how long? _This will take the human race to wonders to satiate desires both subtle and gross. And terrors to freeze your soul. Where no man has gone before._ He looked at his great-uncle and his old friend and research partner. "I assume the two of you are already working on this."

"We've been bouncing ideas off each other," Ford said, nodding. "But for now? For now, we have a celebration planned! You've graduated from high school, and you've all more than earned it."

* * *

Pacifica Elise Northwest stared around her at the ballroom, a mixture of lingering fear and awe running through her. The fear was an afterimage: the result of a lifetime's worth of memories. Of fear of her parents' biting tongues, attacking her for coloring outside the lines even by so much as a hair. And the far more physical pain that had been inflicted on her upstairs. She was also awed. Most of the décor in the ballroom hadn't been changed in the slightest, yet it was now filled with people. People in clean, party clothes, but party clothes you could pick up at Walmart or the mall. Party clothes that didn't cost over a thousand dollars per set and that was on the low end of the scale. It wasn't that she was opposed to black tie affairs on their face. They served a purpose and could be the highlight of the year. So long as they were the _highlight_ of the year. Her parents had acted like they were the end all and be all of their existence. Not even most rich families she knew in California acted like that.

The more she thought of it, the more she marveled at the absurdity of what her parents had been. It had taken her awhile to nail it down precisely but she understood that they were driven by a need to…keep up appearances. Because fundamentally they knew they were living a lie. Her entire life she had been raised to believe in the greatness of the Northwests. That their family wealth had dated back to the Civil War and that the Northwests were self-made men and women and the descendants of self-made men and women. But they hadn't been. The government had picked a local family at random and handed him a fortune by 1840s standards, to take credit for founding the town and erase Quentin Trembley from history. And they'd chosen poorly. They'd chosen someone who even at a distance of nearly two centuries could be diagnosed as having antisocial personality disorder and delusions. Being suddenly catapulted above the rest of their society, Nathaniel Northwest had realized two things. One, he no longer had to play the standard sociopath game of aping human societal norms in order to avoid being caught. And two, that it was those very traits that had led to his success.

So every Northwest after had done the same thing to get what they want. His son had conned the townspeople into denuding Northwest Hill of trees to build its mansion, a mansion that killed dozens of people in the construction, and paying them just enough to claim they weren't slaves (and sometimes not even that). And no one had stopped him. The only people who could have stopped him were…occupied by the confluence of massive historical forces. For the simmering tensions between the Free and Slave states had finally exploded out of control. It had nearly gotten out of hand in the 1850s, when the United States had won rather handily the Mexican-American War. With American forces controlling Mexico City, the United States got everything it wanted. Texas's membership in the United States was recognized, the Rio Grande was set as the southernmost border of Texas, and in exchange for fifteen million dollars and Washington assuming Mexico's debt to its American creditors, gained control of what was today the U.S. states of New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Wyoming and Colorado. Unfortunately, Texas had designs on the eastern half of the New Mexico territory, demands that almost kicked off the Civil War a good decade and a half earlier. Only the Compromise of 1850 had stopped that. In exchange for ten million dollars in bonds, Texas agreed to recognize Federal control of the other new territories gained in the Mexican War. And the Southern Democrats in Congress managed to get a stronger fugitive slave law passed, as well as allowing residents in the newly organized territories of New Mexico and Utah to vote on whether or not to allow slavery. In exchange, California was to be admitted as a free state and the slave trade, but not slavery itself, was banned in DC. Everyone had patted themselves on the back and went home, convinced that they had staved off civil war for good this time.

It didn't work as planned. Enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law proved about as popular as a fart in Sunday school in the North, with riots almost breaking out more than once over attempts to return escaped slaves to the South. Which had only increased the beliefs on the part of Southern that Yankee abolitionist fanatics wanted to come down to the South and force them to free their slaves at gunpoint, complete with bigoted ranting about how they wanted them to force their daughters to marry black men. More than that, the Whig party in the North had broken down, leading to the creation of the modern Republican Party which was opposed to slavery from the very beginning. Which only polarized Southern opinion even further. The increasing dysfunction in the normal political process culminated in the election of 1860, when the South took the election of Illinois Republican Abraham Lincoln personally. Over the winter of 1860 and 1861 seven Southern states, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America. Which, considering itself a loose confederation of sovereign states, considered federal military installations on the soil of said states a threat. It culminated in April of 1861, when attempts to resupply the besieged Federal troops in Fort Sumter at the mouth of Charleston harbor culminated in a Confederate attack on the Fort. The war began in earnest, and when Lincoln put out the call to the states for forces to suppress the insurrection, Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee and North Carolina, declared for the Confederacy as well…and all federal troops in the Pacific Northwest, including the barely four-year-old State of Oregon, were withdrawn for service further east. And while California volunteer infantry and cavalry units were redeployed to cover the region, and Oregon raised its own volunteer units, they had to cover large swaths of Oregon, Washington and Idaho. And so, the only people who could have intervened when Nathaniel Northwests son was setting in motion the events that led to her family getting cursed were both stretched too thin and too busy to do anything about it.

And so, Nathaniel Northwest, junior got his palatial manor atop the hill, screwing over the local population in the process. And while they were holding their Northwest Fest (ironically enough billed as a "Celebration of the salvation of the glorious cause of the Union at the hallowed field of Gettysburg), Archibald Corduroy had died with an axe buried in his skull, setting in motion the events that led to today.

But that was then, this is now. And history is written as much by the actions of the individual then by impersonal forces. The actions of individuals, including herself, had saved their entire reality from Weirdmageddon. And her father had squandered away their money, forcing them to sell the manor, and causing them to move to their vacation home in Piedmont. And now this… a party. Not what her parents had _called_ a party, which was really more of an excuse for them to plot scheme and maneuver for advantage over others, legally or otherwise. Here the vast, expansive ballroom with it's oak walls, and was filled with ordinary people in ordinary, albeit clean clothes, talking and having a good time to contemporary musical styles. Her eyes went to the corner of the room where the snack table was, loaded down with various chips, dips, and pretzels and she smiled, remembering a day five years ago when she discovered that a certain Pines boy wasn't so bad. A boy who'd inspired her to be her own woman and not just an extension of her parents.

Who'd taught her she didn't have to be afraid of those who should have been her protectors.

She turned to look at the boy, the young man, in question. Only to discover he'd been gone from where he'd been holding a rather animated discussion with Wendy.

She cocked her head to the side quizzically. Dipper had never been one for parties like this. Apart from the food. He tended to retreat to more secluded areas. _And I think I know just where he went._

* * *

Dipper stared at the enormous engine, softly sipping from his apple juice as he considered the possibilities. If they could reproduce this technology, the potential was simply enormous. Space travel would become far more routine for more people. The costs associated with orbital launches were already dropping, opening the field to private corporations, but this would make traveling to other planets in this system and other stars cost effective as well. Manufacturing could be moved from the surface into orbit. Mining could be shifted into space at all. Luna, Mars, and the other worlds and their moons contained all the ores human civilization could ever want. If anything, they'd have to be _wary_ of _too many_ metals, of injecting so much into the global economy the price collapsed.

"I thought I'd find you down here," a familiar warm tenor with a pronounced San Fernando Valley accent said from behind him, and he turned around to see Pacifica Northwest standing behind him. The tall woman, fair-skinned with blonde hair and blue eyes smiled warmly at her, and Dipper found his face heating as he abruptly looked away from her. "Thinking about this?" She said, gesturing at the hyperdrive module behind him.

"Of course," he said, "I mean here I thought that we'd lost our chance at discovering FTL in our lifetime when Bill conned Grunkle Ford into using it in the portal. And now…" he found himself blinking back tears. Of happiness and awe.

"And now we're on the cusp of a new era for the human race," she continued, her own eyes going misty. "Its amazing isn't it? That's it survived this long. I mean when the ship this came from plowed itself into the Earth, our continents were just beginning to take on the configuration we're familiar with today, and the first monkeys had just emerged. It remained hidden over millions of years, until a rather…less than shining member of this bipedal, tool-using great ape species from Africa found it and hid it away from the rest of the world until far more deserving members of said bipedal, tool-using species from Africa found it," that last comment was delivered in a biting tone that could have bitten chunks clean through the deck planking.

Dipper's heart twisted in his chest and his hand reached out to touch her shoulder. "Hey," he said softly. "It's okay."

"No, it's not, Dipper," she said, her voice wavering in anger. "When did we acquire this? How? For what purpose?"

"He or one of your earlier ancestors could have just found it, thought it looked cool, and used it as part of his private collection," he said, with more surety than he felt.

Paz smirked mirthlessly, "If you truly believe that than I'm currently looking to sell the Bay Bridge on behalf of a Nigerian prince and I think you'd make an excellent buyer."

Dipper barked a short laugh. "No, I don't believe it. But we're going to be here the entire summer. Enough time, for us to find some sort of answers surely."

"I just hope it won't end as…badly as last time," Paz said, unmistakable fear in her blue eyes as she put her hand on his shoulder.

Dipper followed the lump in his throat that unaccountably formed there, both from the memories of a colossal Bill Cipher standing over the town and the fact the most beautiful woman he'd ever met had her hand on his shoulder. "I doubt there's much that can even approach that, let alone top it."

Paz grimaced. "True." And then she fell silent. Abruptly Dipper was… _aware_ of her. There was no space between them. His hand on her shoulder burned hot even through her shirt, and her lips were parted just so, begging him to kiss them.

Instinct took over, in that instant (despite his shyness when it came to Paz, his awkwardness around women in general had disappeared in wonderful form in the last couple years) and he pressed his lips to hers. Paz after a heartbeat's hesitation, pushed her lips against hers.

Inside his brain was a roil. He was kissing Pacifica. He was _kissing Pacifica._ His best friend. The girl he'd spent many long hours playing videogames with. The girl, perhaps driven by a thirst for knowledge about how her family had gotten to the state it had gotten too, studied history and anthropology with a passion that rivaled his own. The girl who had HALO dropped onto the Fearamid alongside him, an absolutely steely look on her face to match the steel in her veins.

The woman whom, he'd realized, he'd been steadily falling in love with.

She pressed himself against him, and moaned softly into his mouth at contact with the hardness between his legs. His hands snaked down to the small of her back and yanked her against him roughly, the contact pulling another husky moan out of her. What reservations he had flew from his mind as he pressed her against the console behind her…and against several buttons at once.

What happened next was no one person's fault. Not totally. Disasters are not caused by a single mistake, but are the result of a whole chain of errors. The proximate cause of this disaster was two eighteen-year-olds making in out in a science lab full of sensitive equipment. The other error was made by Ford and McGucket. Two old men who, despite their undoubted brilliance, had still spent literally decades trapped in situations that left them out of step with modern technology. And because they'd been out of sync, they'd neglected to password protect their consoles, and as a result the aforementioned couple inadvertently sent the command to pull all available power and channel it into the hyperdrive.

And also, McGucket had drastically overestimated how much power was necessary to create a stable wormhole.

Dipper's eyes flew open as the console's screen lit up and he broke the kiss hastily, pulling Paz back up

"Oh, _shit_!" She swore as the popup box read, "Power to Test Object" and a rapidly growing number in megajoules, and Paz's hands flew over the console as she desperately tried to find the command to cut the power.

A high-pitched buzzing sound filled the air and Dipper, looked up, shock and fear running down his back as the hyperdrive came to life, its various consoles glowing.

"Paz!" He shouted, his voice wavering. "We should get out of here! Get help!"

Paz gave a short, sharp jerk of her head in refusal, her fingers continuing to fly over the keyboard. "There's no time! We have to shut it down now, if we don't-,"

Her words were lost as a blinding blue-white flash of light filled the air.


	3. Chapter Two

A/N: I'm sorry this is late. Life has bee somewhat hectic with me the past few months. Now, without further adieu the second chapter of my epic story.

Chapter Two

Pacifica's moaned weakly, as short, sharp bursts of pain stabbed through her. Abruptly, she realized, even as she floated in darkness, that it was her _head_ that was seething in pain. And with the realization that she had a head, was that she had a body. Her limbs began to feel heavy, and she clenched her fists and toes reflexively. _Good,_ the thought drifted across the darkness. _I'm not paralyzed._ Her eyes fluttered open…and her pupils widened. Staring up at her was the brightest heavens she'd ever witnessed. The glowing band of the Milky Way arced across the night sky, a brilliantly glowing stream of light and dark. And on either side of that great band, were the stars that could be picked out individually by the naked eye, in all their millions and all their glory. Endless dots, glowing white and yellow, blue and red against the black.

She stood up, groaning as her back protested against the movement. As all at once the memories of last night came over her. She'd been kissing Dipper. Kissing _Dipper!_ And they'd bumped into an improperly secured computer console. They'd fought desperately to drain the power from the alien hyperdrive and then there was that flash of green light. And she was here…and she didn't know where Dipper was. She resisted the urge, sliding down her spine into her legs to run off into the underbrush and fight. First thing first, try to figure out where she was. She couldn't begin to look for Dipper until she knew where she was.

She looked around her, and her breath caught as she didn't see the huge towering pine trees of the forests that surrounded the town of her birth. She wheeled around. Gravity Falls was nestled in the Cascades…which were nowhere to be found. She looked out towards the Three Sisters, the name for the three dormant volcanoes which could always be seen off in the distance, and saw a massive cliff face rising out of the ground where there shouldn't be one.

Then she heard it, her ears pricking to the sound and she started forward through the trees, and saw it. A massive river, its brown silty surface glowing in the combined light of the moon and stars. She stared across the bank, at the silhouetted trees on the other side. And her breath caught again, as she recognized however vaguely, the shape. The dense round crown that could never be mistaken for anything else even at night was what gave it away

"There aren't many sycamore figtrees back home," she said softly to the trees around her. "Not ones that aren't imported anyway. That narrows things down." _In a more than disturbing kind of way._

 _Ficus sycamorus,_ the sycamore fig, was native to Africa south of the Sahel and north of the Tropic of Capricorn . And had been spread and cultivated in what was today Egypt, Israel, and Lebanon since antiquity. Which left quite a broad area for her and, she hoped to God, Dipper, to be in.

* * *

 _What I need to do is find the nearest town. The belt that sycamore figs are native too encompasses several former British colonies so there really shouldn't be a language barrier if I landed right. I can find help. And if she's here, we'll find her. Then we can contact the nearest American consulate and they'll get us home. Or failing that, launch a massive worldwide search._

"Pacifica!" Dipper called frantically, through the trees at the heart of the clearing he'd come too in as his heart tried to beat its way out of his ribcage. "Paz!" This was insane. One moment he and Paz had been making out in the basement and the next moment they were out God only knew where. Though he had a sinking feeling he knew roughly where they'd ended up. There weren't, after all, that many sycamore figs in Oregon.

"Paz!"

 _She could be halfway around the world from you. Dipper. She could be halfway around the world from you dead in a ditch._

 _No, don't think like that._

He took a deep, shuddering breath. _Okay, first things first. Basic survival. Sycamore figs are edible, so that's not going to be a problem in the short-term. And I think I here running water ahead through the trees. Then I'll try to find my way back to the nearest settlement._

Abruptly the image of Paz's lifeless eyes staring up at the sky appeared in his head. He dismissed it with a short, sharp jerk.

 _She's alive, damn it, I know she is,_ he thought. _Anything else is unacceptable._

He was snapped out of his musings by rustling in the underbrush. Dipper cast about wildly, and saw a large tree branch lying on the forest floor. He grabbed, the thick, heavy piece of gnarled wood (being strong and disproportionately broad-shouldered even for his height had its advantages) and held it before him two-handed. If it was a leopard tracking him through the underbrush, he was much too late to avoid action, which meant he had to force it to disengage. Though, he hastily slid behind a tree. _At this point it wouldn't hurt too much to try._

Then, coming through the trees, blonde hair framed in the light of the heavens shining down, was Pacifica Northwest. Her hair was bedraggled, and her party dress was torn in places that, in any other circumstances, like the one's that had obtained _before_ this lunatic situation came out of left field, would have made him want to finish the job. As it stood he was just glad she wasn't' dead in that hypothetical ditch.

"Paz!" He said, relief blooming in his voice.

"Dipper!"

As if she'd teleported through the distance between them, Dipper's arms were now full of leggy blonde. Dipper crushed her against him, and Paz wrapped her arms around him.

"Oh Dipper," she moaned against his shoulder. "I didn't know where in hell you were. You could have been anywhere, or…"

"I know," Dipper whispered against her hair. Dipper tilted her head forward and pressed a desperate kiss to her lips that Pacifica returned earnestly.

After a long moment, Pacifica broke the kiss, and cupped the side of his face with her cheek. "Well," he said breathily, "now that we're sure we're both alive let's figure out a way of getting back home."

"Actually," Pacifica began, her eyes narrowed in concentration. "Now that I think about it, we're probably better served bivouacking here for the night. We have no clue where across the entire breadth of Africa we've ended up, I doubt we're near enough to any significant town to have cell coverage, and neither one of us has a sat phone."

"Well," Dipper said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out his iPhone. "Let's see, shall we." Then he looked down at his screen, and his heart sank. It was cracked. More than cracked, it was smashed in at the center, with a spidery wave of cracks across the entire screen visible in the starlight. "Shit."

"And I think I dropped my purse when we were," and she swallowed visibly.

Dipper's face flushed. He'd felt how wet she'd been. He'd known they had been aroused to the point that one of them probably would have stabbed the other if they'd tried to stop. If they'd just gone up to one of their rooms…"Yeah. So…we'll go with your plan."

Pacifica sighed, her head moving up and down like a bobble head doll. "Yeah. We should get a fire going."

Dipper blanched. "Are you sure that's wise? We don't know where we are. And depending on where we've ended up, those mountains up there could be lousy with anything from Islamist militants to 'rebels' that are little more than gangbangers."

"Or they might not," Paz countered. "And in case you haven't forgotten, this is almost certainly Africa. There are little things like lions and leopards. And African wild dogs. Animals that are usually are most active at night. Who hunt at night. Absent guns, fire is our best defense. Plus, it'll keep the mosquitos from eating us alive." _And very possibly infecting us with malaria while they're at it._ "So yes, absent any idea where we are precisely, and without any of the usual medicines or survival supplies usually employed out here, the risks of not building a fire, far outweigh the risks of putting out a signal to any potential hostiles to come over and kill us."

Dipper's mouth, still open, to argue that whole point, closed it with an audible pop. She was right, of course. And there really was nothing to choose between bleeding out from a terrorist's bullet or being mauled by a lion or leopard. Or, God forbid, that three-ton death machine called hippopotamus: the most dangerous mammal in Africa (aside from their own race). Despite their seemingly ungainly barrel-shaped bodies, a roused hippopotamus could gallop up to thirty kilometers an hour on land, and adult females had a bite force of over eighteen hundred pounds per square inch. And the fact that they only had data on females made it even more imperative that they avoid getting too close to them while they were here: the males are simply too aggressive to test.

"Let's get to work building that fire," Dipper said quickly.

Sometime later, Dipper found himself sitting on a log next to Pacifica, sighing as the heat radiated towards them from the firepit they'd put together from hastily gathered rocks and what pieces of dry wood they could find.

"You know," Pacifica said after a moment. "Us being out here is our fault."

Dipper sighed, his face heating with mingled embarrassment and lust as the memories of what they'd been about to do returned. "Yeah. Yeah it is."

"I mean, if we'd just, oh," and her face flushed and she suddenly started looking very intently at the fire. He swallowed the lump in his throat that had appeared as he thought about what had almost passed between them in that lab.

"What happened back there, Dipper? Where were we going with that?"

A few years ago he would have been tongue-tied by what he'd wanted to do. But he was not some kid talking to his first crush anymore. "I was about to lift up the hem of your party dress and fuck you," Dipper said unwaveringly, his tone belying the knots his stomach was happily tying itself into. "I think that's answer enough." Pacifica's face flushed, visible even in the red light of the fire. "And I don't think you would have said no to me."

"No," Pacifica said, after a moment, meeting his gaze defiantly. "I wouldn't have."

"Though," Dipper said, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly. "I probably should have dragged you into bed to do that."

Pacifica nodded vigorously, her face somehow managing to blush even further. "That probably would have been the wisest course, Though," she said, a hint of a mischievous tone on her voice, "it would have been an undeniable spice if you'd done me somewhere else."

"Oh?"

"That sitting room with that silver inverted fleur-de-lis on a white carpet is exactly as my parents left it after they pulled out. Honestly, I can't think of a better screw you to my unlamented parents if you'd done me there."

Dipper smiled. That was just the sinfully evil suggestion he would have expected out of her…and something he should have thought of. "I suppose I can make love to you on that sofa when we get back."

She snorted. "Please, I know your reputation. I don't think soft style is your thing. And it isn't mine either."

"Oh really?" It was his turn to blush again, he did like it rather rough. And so did most of the girl's he'd hooked up with and dated during his time in high school.

She winked at him. A knowing, saucy wink. "For now, though," with a faintly disappointed sigh, "we should focus on surviving where we are. We don't have the luxury of giving in in for all we know is hostile territory."

Dipper gave a frustrated sigh, and nodded. She had a point after all. And he couldn't very well have made a stink about the fire giving away their position and then insist on doing something else…extremely ill-advised in the current situation. But in the meantime, they were in _Africa_. The home continent of humanity. Everything about who and what he was had evolved in relation to the ground where he stood right now in some form. Humanity on this continent had the greatest amount of genetic variation out of the entire population. Most genetic variation outside Africa was a subset of genetic variation _within_ Africa. Contrary to the impression given by home DNA ancestry kits that only looked at a few of the differences that did occur, using testing methods that tended to exaggerate the level of differences that were there. Even the fact that a few of the ancestors of all non-Africans had interbred with the humanoid species they shared the planet with hadn't changed that fact: the interbreeding events themselves had only involved a small handful of individuals mating with members of species' that themselves had their origins in Africa. Giving the human race only a few novel genes. The rest was identical to what modern humans already had. Everything they were, they owed to where they stood. If he wasn't so tired he could weep.

Dipper sighed and looked up at the vast panoply of the heavens opening up above them, the great glowing band of the Milky Way running along the sky, formed from every star in the galaxy that could not be distinguished from the naked eye. He smiled almost despite himself. He'd always loved seeing a night sky unimpeded by any source of nearby light pollution…and vast swathes of Sub-Saharan Africa simply didn't have the light pollution fingerprint to really block it out. Which admittedly didn't say anything good about the infrastructure the hundreds of millions of people living there had to rely on but there wasn't much they could do about that. Not right now. What he could do right now was sit back, relax, and watch the night sky with Pacifica.

 _Huh,_ he thought, staring up at that beautiful, awe-inspiring sight. _That's strange. I don't see any of the constellations._ Constellations were generally grouped together into two groups based on their visibility in relation to the equator. Northern Hemisphere constellations and Southern Hemisphere constellations. However, the closer one got to the equator the more the skies that were visible to astronomers began to overlap. An observer sitting right on the equator could theoretically view both skies at once. On a clear, moonless night like this, he should be able to pick out _something_. But he couldn't. Not Taurus, or Perseus, or Triangulum or any other constellation that were visible from anywhere north of the equator including Gravity Falls, or the Southern Cross or Centaurus, or Musca, visible from the south. He could see the Galactic Center, but that was about it. Nothing else was where it was supposed to be. And he'd been on vacation in more remote areas both north and south before. Enough to be generally familiar with the sky to be able to pick out constellations with relative ease.

"Oh, my God," Dipper said softly, a cold chill running down his spine as the implications of what he was looking at, a sky on which no contemporary astronomer had ever seen, hit him.

"What?" Paz said, tearing herself away from the sight to look at him, concerned. "What's wrong?"

"I can't find any constellations. Can you?"

"Well," she said, looking up at the sky. She'd accompanied Mabel and their family on a few of those vacations, she was as good as he was at looking for those stars.

Paz let out a horrified breath as the realization finally hit her. "Oh no," visibly trembling even in the half-light of the fire,"Oh, no, no, no!"  
The constellations were not fixed. They shifted and changed with time as their solar system moved through the galactic disk in relation to everything else. The fact that they could not orient themselves by anything…

"I think," Dipper said, swallowing the lump that appeared in his throat at the cost. "I think that we not only need to find out where we are, but _when._ "


End file.
